Dalhousie University Creates Open Source Software Mirror

Dalhousie University now has its own open source software mirror

At the Dalhousie University‘s Faculty of Computer Science, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the staff have opened a software mirror repository of open source software. A software mirror is an extra site to download software packages such as Linux distributions. The mirror links to the original source of the software and updates itself whenever the original does. This can make downloads faster as the additional locations can be located closer to the user and allow the downloads to be spread across multiple servers.

The Dalhousie University’s software mirror was setup by Scott Walsh of the Faculty of Computer Science and Karl Vollmer of Information Technology Services. Their mirror holds copies of open source software they believe to be in common use in the region, such as distributions of Linux (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE) and Openoffice.org. The mirrors of each package update frequently, some twice a day and others daily. Soon they hope to have their mirror listed on the official mirror lists for the software they host.